The Top 500 Atari 2600 Homebrews: The Full Introduction
The full-length Introduction for the ongoing Retro series cataloging the 21st-century history of the Atari 2600 game library, “The Top 500 Atari 2600 Homebrews.” See the Video Games section for more.
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Introduction
{NB: This Retro series is dedicated to Al Yarusso of AtariAge, a man without whom none of what’s discussed hereafter would have been possible. He’s without a doubt the single most important figure in Atari 2600 homebrewing—and from what I can tell, the hardest working.}
The Atari 2600 was the first home video game console that really mattered, and the one that made gaming a nationwide phenomenon in the United States the late 1970s and early 1980s—even if a few terrible business decisions by what was then the Atari Inc. ultimately caused the Video Game Crash of 1983, an event that almost destroyed gaming as a burgeoning hobby but eventually (thankfully) paved the way for the arrival of the Nintendo Entertainment System two years later.
Many modern gamers look at Atari 2600 games as virtually unplayable, grumping that only a handful still hold up as gaming artifacts one can spend more than a minute or two enjoying. It’s of course an overstated complaint, as of the 517 Atari 2600 games released during the original lifespan of the console—the console’s recent re-release, as the Atari 2600+, notwithstanding—several dozen feature excellent and even timeless gameplay (a topic discussed and quantified at great length in this 2021 Retro report).
But the fact remains that the Famicom—that is, the NES, as imported from Japan to America—was a monumental leap beyond the graphic capabilities of the Atari, as is evidenced by the fact that NES games can run up to 512K in size and most Atari 2600 games are 1K, 2K, 4K, 8K, or 16K (with a very, very small number being 32K or above).
All the foregoing only makes it more exciting that, after only their NES-homebrewing peers, the Atari 2600 homebrew community is the largest, most dynamic, most prolific retro game development community on Earth. It’s astounding not just how many Atari 2600 games have been developed for the system since its original lifespan ended, but also how many of them take the capabilities of the system to such new heights that it can honestly be said that the Atari 2600 homebrew scene has reinvigorated the system.
And it’s not just original homebrews worth talking about when it comes to the 2600.
Far more than is the case with the NES homebrew scene, Atari 2600 homebrewers are committed to updating the console’s original classics, and in too many cases to name have done so in ways that change how we think about the original 517 games released for the system—all of which were released into an idiosyncratic video gaming culture that simply no longer exists.
The late 1970s and early 1980s were port-heavy times in gaming, for very good reason: in the second generation of home video game consoles, “arcades” (as a physical space in which to hang out and play on large video-game “cabinets”) were still very much a cultural setpiece in America, inasmuch the very best video games were to be found in such spaces and almost nowhere else. So it’s understandable that the programmers for early home video game consoles—whether the 2600, the Intellivision, or ColecoVision—were focused on bringing the arcade experience into Americans’ living rooms. For some modern gamers this makes the second generation of video games less exciting, perhaps understandably so given the console library’s surfeit of non-original content, but that’s where Atari 2600 homebrewing comes in: it takes games that may have been cynical cash-ins by publishers in the late 1970s and 1980s and refreshes them so we can better understand why these games were so popular in arcades in the first place.
Indeed, an old argument that might seem to make a lot of sense in the context of NES homebrewing—“Why play a port when there are so many fine originals?”—is turned on its head in the context of Atari 2600 homebrews, and even with the Atari 2600 console generally. Why? Because one of the main selling points of the Atari 2600 was that it showed America that the arcade experience, with all its thrilling short-form genius, could be reproduced at home (putting aside for a moment that that experience has now pushed beyond this early revelation thanks to the Atari 2600 homebrewing community).
While some may argue, in eyeing Atari 2600 homebrew ports or Atari 2600 homebrew originals, that we can’t retroactively “credit” the Atari 2600, as a console, with games that weren’t released for it at the time; in other words, some will say that the system can’t be raised in America’s general esteem based on aftermarket publications. But the fact remains that if you’re going to play Atari 2600 games once again in 2024—and you most certainly should—there’s no compelling reason to replay Wizard of Wor when you can play the refurbished Wizard of Wor Arcade (from Champ Games) as a homebrew.
Atari 2600 ports and updates add so many graphical and quality-of-life improvements, while retaining the capacity to be played on an original Atari 2600, that they feel more like extremely fun short-form games from 2024 than a re-treading of well-trod ground.
Indeed, it’s worthwhile to think about 2024’s mobile games in the context of the Atari 2600, and not just because Atari (as Atari SA) has reemerged on the gaming scene as a maker of mobile versions of original Atari 2600 releases—many with notable graphics and quality-of-life upgrades—as well as new mobile games that retain the aesthetic vitality of second-generation home console games. In fact, the quality of Atari 2600 games that many modern gamers seem to miss is the same quality many gamers miss when speaking scornfully of certain mobile games: in a time of exceptionally unhappy complexities in our Western political, cultural, and economic spheres, we sometimes want to play simple but well-designed games for ten to twenty minutes at a time rather than lose ourselves for 200 hours in a “AAA” modern-console game that’s infinitely more complex but risks forming a black hole of self-isolation, self-loathing and ennui.
More on what makes “second-generation” games fundamentally differtent from their successors in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s is discussed—in great detail—below.
What Makes the Atari 2600 Special in 2024
What I appreciate about Atari 2600 games as a video game reviewer and art critic and longtime player of such games—my first system(s) were an Intellivision with an Atari 2600 adapter—as well as a retired university professor whose academic specialization was digital culture (including gaming), is that they fit a particular psychological need that no other games fit half as well. There’s a reason retro aesthetics are making a big comeback; there’s a reason so many games on Steam and Switch look like they could have been released in the 1980s or early 1990s. The key facts of the matter are these:
Pixelated sprite artwork is beautiful, even when basic;
game design and gameplay has always been more important than graphics;
most gamers don’t have the time to devote hundreds of hours to any game;
games that arrive in small “bin” or “rom” sizes are easier to store and transfer;
a gaming community where most digital files are distributed free gives a young person without much personal income the ability to try out a massive number of games without bankrupting themselves;
Atari 2600 game development is approachable—if still hard—for new game devs or anyone hoping to learn more about how video games are made (a fact that may also be true for NES game development, but remains untrue for modern consoles);
Atari’s recent celebration of its fiftieth anniversary has helped feed a renaissance in Atari game-playing and game-collecting, with Atari both re-releasing the Atari 2600 and releasing new games as part of its anniversary festivities; and
most influential of all, as I will discuss in much more detail below, Atari has now bought AtariAge (and, for that matter, its decades-old Coke-versus-Pepsi-like rival, Intellivision), putting it at the center of a massive homebrew sales operation.
All of the above make it a very exciting time to be an Atari 2600 fan, and an especially good time to be following the Atari 2600 homebrew scene. So I thought that, in light of all this, it’s a good time to aggregate data from the rapidly proliferating universe of YouTube videos on Atari 2600 homebrews to try to devise a comprehensive ranking of all Atari 2600 homebrews out there, while simultaneously adding my own rankings of these games in the same way I have done for NES homebrews. Retro is in fact now the home of the largest archive of information on NES homebrews anywhere in the world, and hopes to be one of the largest archives of information on Atari 2600 homebrews in 2024 and beyond.
Please note that this is very much an ongoing Retro project; it will take a number of iterations of these rankings for me to develop a full list of all Atari 2600 homebrews.
With the above in mind, the rankings below are rightly framed as two rankings in one:
The first ranking is my own as a professional video game reviewer, video game journalist, and art critic, and is designated by the numbers along the left-hand side of the listings below (which are divided into a number of discrete categories, all of them listed in the Table of Contents you’ll see further down in this report);
the second ranking reflects how many other Atari video game reviewers deemed a particular game noteworthy, and is designated by numbers between brackets in each game listing. As relatively few such reviewers have done proper rankings of their picks, I’ve counted a game as “deemed noteworthy” in the view of a given reviewer based primarily of what they say about a game (unless the game indeed appears in a ranking by that reviewer, or won an annual Atari Homebrew Award).
Differences Between Atari 2600 Homebrewing and NES Homebrewing
Fora and Markets
Putting aside cosmetic issues—Atari 2600 homebrewers are slightly more likely to use their real names when working on game development, rather than a dev handle—the simple fact is that the destruction of the NintendoAge website years ago more or less scattered the NES homebrewing community into a number of micro-communities, whereas the fact that the AtariAge website didn’t meet the same fate has determined the rather different fate of Atari 2600 homebrews. {Note: Some amazingly vibrant NES homebrewing communities still exist—NESmaker and NesDev, for example—but the loss of NintendoAge as a massive virtual town square for NES homebrewers is still quite keenly felt.}
Indeed, the Atari 2600 homebrewing scene allows us to see what would’ve happened if the main watering-hole for NES devs hadn’t dissipated into thin air. AtariAge is a real-time marvel whose influence on Atari 2600 homebrewing can’t possibly be overstated.
At AtariAge, you can buy many of the top Atari 2600 homebrews onsite—as AtariAge has become a publisher, which would have continued happening at NintendoAge (as it did happen, if only in a scattershot way) if the latter website had lived. That’s clearly a great thing. On the other hand, having one website be such a powerful force in a very niche homebrewing scene invariably creates unexpected complications; for instance, when AtariAge was purchased by Atari SA and understandably decided to stop selling ports for IP reasons, it meant that certain publishers specializing in ports—as readers will see below, Champ Games is the leading example of this, having put out countless fantastic ports, de-makes, and arcade-game conversions since 2016—suddenly found themselves stripped of their primary method of distribution. That can be absolutely crippling for a small game developer with only a small market to tap in the first place.
Dev Tools
Both NES homebrewing and Atari 2600 homebrewing feature tools intended to make such game development easier: in the former case, NESmaker, and in the latter, “bB” or “batari Basic.” Just so, in both cases there has at times been a certain hostility in evidence among old-school coders toward those who use these tools rather than (e.g.) 6502 Assembly; the argument has gone, in both instances, that coding tools ideal for relative neophytes must by necessity streamline the game development process to the point that all video games created by the method in question start to look identical to one another.
In practice—again, as to both the NES and bB—that’s untrue. While yes, it’s possible to quickly spot a NESmaker game, and even easier indeed to spot a batari Basic game, that’s only because certain visual setpieces tend to reappear. But a quality homebrew is an aggregation of dozens or even scores of visual setpieces, not to mention all the intricacies of game concept and game design and game mechanics we expect to see in the art of video-game homebrewing, with the result that just because one can tell that a given game is in bB or NESmaker, it means nothing about the quality of that game.
Fortunately, both homebrewing communities have graciously come to accept this.
Oldheads in both homebrewing scenes now admit, if on occasion only grudgingly, that a fantastic—absolutely top-shelf—game can be made in NESmaker and/or bB, and therefore it should be no surprise (a) that the rankings below are littered with such games, including at the very highest echelons of each subgenre ranking, and also (b) that I have taken no steps to distinguish between homebrews by how they were created. Candidly, this only matters, if at all, to devs; it doesn’t and frankly shouldn’t matter one whit to gamers, video game reviewers, or art critics; while telltale signs of conventional NESmaker or bB use can certainly take some points from a title in terms of its aesthetic originality, the simple fact is that if the conceit and gameplay of a title are superlative and the GUI is expertly executed, it’s really not going to matter much if at all to the end product what’s beneath the hood.
In reality, the sole abiding importance in the NESmaker and bB phenomena has been the democratization, to a degree at least, of a form of art-making that previously had been reserved for those with only a very special set of skills. While of course that’s still very much true—game developers are artists, and in many instances veritable wizards—it is also now the case that, in both the NES and Atari 2600 homebrewing scenes, we are seeing people getting involved in game development who by their own admission never would have thought it possible. Needless to say, that’s a wonderful thing, indeed.
Legal Issues
While Nintendo might understandably be concerned about NES homebrews because they in theory could eventually compete with NES games available via the Nintendo Switch Online store—and indeed should compete with these latter games, given that many NES homebrews are as good or better than original NES releases—in the case of the Atari 2600 its older fan base, modest computing power, and connection to a brand that hasn’t been in the console-making business for years (not counting the re-release of the Atari 2600) means Atari should be bending over backwards to not just legitimize but encourage and perhaps even sponsor Atari 2600 homebrewing. And so too should any companies that had hits in the second generation of video games that no one can even remember anymore; the best thing that could possibly happen to such games is the arrival of a group of talented artists (like John Champeau of Champ Games) who want to refurbish, reinvigorate, and even gently reimagine games once believed to be sure-fire future classics. Homebrewers couldn’t possibly be a bigger asset to any video gaming community than Atari 2600 homebrewers are to that console and its maker, and it was always disappointing when anyone from the many iterations of Atari ever acted as though they thought otherwise.
Those days seem to be over now, however—as with the purchase of AtariAge by Atari SA, the owners of the Atari IP finally seem to grok that the future of Atari broadly writ is in homebrewing much more so than any new in-house game or console publications.
So what does all this mean for video game reviewers, art critics, gaming historians, video game journalists, and—perhaps most of all—nostalgic retro gamers? The real answer is, we still don’t know. We don’t know if second-gen homebrewers will keep coming up against obstacles rather than helping hands as they seek to expand the Atari 2600 game library; we don’t know if Atari SA and AtariAge will be successful in getting the rights to publish certain once-available but now hideously expensive (on the secondary market) ports and conversions, such as Juno First (which Konami has complained to homebrewers about in stern terms) and Draconian (from Darrell Spice Jr. and SpiceWare). I may personally prefer to play original aftermarket retro games, but it is essential in the Atari space in a way it really isn’t in the NES space for us to understand the value of ports and conversions, as these game development ethoi help capture a good percentage of what made the early 1980s such an exciting time to be a gamer. Gamers finding that many arcade classics could suddenly be playable without coins and at home was a big deal in a way it’s difficult to explain to younger gamers.
Gaming Genres and Subcultures
Perhaps one way of explaining why and how Atari 2600 gaming is just different from its peers is to look at the breakdowns of Atari 2600 homebrews and note how many of them fall into the “Arcade” gaming sub-genre (part of the broader “Action” category; “Arcade” is generally reserved for single-screen playspaces). The reason for this—and another key difference between NES homebrewing and Atari 2600 homebrewing—is that gaming culture pre-1983 Crash was entirely unlike gaming culture post-Crash.
Pre-Crash, games that focused on shooting for a high score were all the rage, as opposed to, say, games that pitted you against other opponents or games that were narratively driven. So while of course it’s particularly exciting now to see how many delightfully anachronistic Atari 2600 homebrews are being created—e.g., in the “Fighting” sub-genre, or with “Adventure” or “RPG” games that feature narratives—it’s also important for those gamers who fail to understand the allure of Atari games to note that the draw of many such games was the same as that of many arcade games: playing a game over and over to try to get the highest score possible, a very different gaming ethos than we find with AAA-game gamers today, whose the focus is often on open-world exploration and dialogue trees (albeit “achievements” are also en vogue, and these aren’t so different from the score-mongering arcade gamers are known for).
All of which underscores, yet again, why the Atari 2600 was such a big deal. If gaming culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s was about achieving high scores, arcades were both a blessing and a curse because kids could spend hours there but could also lose all their money. If you came from a wealthy family, perhaps you had sufficient coins to play arcade games for hours; most of us would spend all the money we’d come to the arcade with—which usually wasn’t very much—within about a half-hour or so. So when Atari announced that it would now be possible to play single-screen games that were designed to be played over and over and over not at a second location seeking to make a minute-by-minute profit off you but in the comfort of your home after school, it transformed gaming from something like going out to eat—which most families can only afford to do occasionally, if at all—to a long-term hobby that one could reasonably imagine getting absorbed into for months or years or even decades.
So when gamers—even retro gamers who love the NES—scoff at the graphics of the Atari 2600 or at the notion that games for the system are still being made, or when even retro gamers who love Atari 2600 homebrews try to distance themselves from the port scene, it is, in a very real sense, missing the entire point of what made the second generation of video games and home-console game-playing unique.
Sidebar: The Video Game Crash of 1983
Another thing to keep in mind when looking at Atari homebrews as opposed to NES homebrews is that, as noted above, it was Atari that helped caused the Great Video Game Crash of 1983—and Nintendo that helped rescue the world from it—and that is not a coincidence. Atari made countless mistakes trying to become the world’s first gaming behemoth, including being almost unbearably cheap with ports and arcade conversions, forcing devs to create substandard products (Pac-Man being the classic example of this) that it would take homebrewers working solus many decades to fix.
An even more famous misstep, as it’s the one that caused the Crash, was allowing a large number of low-grade development studios to make games for the Atari 2600, which had the effect of lowering the overall quality of the console’s game library in a way the public couldn’t help but notice. Nor could the public help but notice that the box art on many Atari games was absolutely gorgeous—in fact, some of the best box art video games have ever seen, even still today—even as the graphics of the games themselves (particularly in the case of fly-by-night third-party developers) left a lot to be desired. Was it reasonable for parents in the late 1970s and early 1980s expect that the games they were buying their kids would look like the Renaissance paintings on their covers? No. But given the quality issues the console was having already, it just gave them something else to gripe about, and gripe about it they certainly did. Then they stopped buying their kids video games altogether, causing a full-market “crash.”
These and other business missteps by Atari are the reason why Nintendo was much more careful with its licensing deals when it launched the FamiCom Disk System and then the Family Computer (“FamiCom”) post-Crash. In fact, Nintendo created a “Seal of Quality” that it would only permit to appear on the boxes of games it had played and explicitly approved. This fact helps explain why, still today, there isn’t much of a port culture in NES homebrewing, at least apart from the earliest NES homebrewers (many of whom were big Atari 2600 fans), whereas Atari 2600 gaming culture has always just assumed that there are lots of great games already extant that need to be ported to the Atari 2600 and that many previously ported games must be improved upon in this century because Atari rushed them to market (or let others do so) last century.
Overall Game Quality
The most notable difference between NES homebrewing and Atari 2600 homebrewing is that whereas NES homebrewers have been working for over 25 years to try to build a library that can compare to the NES library and are still years away from doing so (though to be clear, they’re well on their way), the Atari 2600 indie scene is unmistakably better than the original Atari 2600 library. Let me repeat that, because it almost beggars belief: far more extremely high-quality Atari 2600 games have been released in this century as compared to the 20th century.
The implications of this are highly significant, inasmuch as a contemporary gamer who doesn’t love NES games can easily justify skipping the entire NES homebrew scene because if he or she doesn’t like original NES games they probably won’t much like NES homebrews either—whereas someone who says arcade-style second-gen video gaming doesn’t interest them actually can’t make such a judgment until they’ve played the top Atari 2600 homebrews. It’s hard to imagine your average Gen Z Twitch speedrunner not getting hooked on the back-breakingly hard but also very fast Lead, or anyone who likes retro platformers on Steam not deeming Game of the Bear adorable.
The same gamer who likes Golgo 13 for the NES would probably love Spies in the Night.
While Deepstone Catacomb is no Legend of Zelda, it may nevertheless trigger nostalgia for those obsessed with the latter game.
And Juno First can make an argument for being better than a number of NES shooters.
In short, it’s really no longer the case that one can say they understand the Atari 2600 gaming experience simply because they were young and alive and gaming in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Only those who have immersed themselves in the shockingly vibrant and sprawling Atari 2600 homebrew scene can really say they understand the console. Yes, that’s a bold claim—and not one I think could be made with respect to any other home console—but in the case of the Atari 2600, it just happens to be true.
Size Restrictions
There are other considerations, in distinguishing between Atari 2600 homebrewing and all other homebrewing, that are of a much more esoteric nature. For instance, whereas an NES ROM can be up to 512K, as noted above, an Atari 2600 game will either be 1K, 2K, 4K, 8K, 16K, or (in very rare instances) 32K or 64K. Atari 2600 homebrewers tend to be much more aware of these size restrictions than their peers brewing for other consoles, in part for the obvious reason—the more limits one is under, the more one has to be aware of those limits at all times—but also because, just as NES homebrewers are only now discovering how much more can be pulled out of the NES (as a piece of hardware) in terms of graphics, as evidenced particularly in an upcoming NES homebrew like Former Dawn, Atari Inc.’s fundamental cheapness and candidly sloppiness in the early 1980s prompted it to force many of its developers to write code faster and with more limitations than was necessary. The result is that many Atari 2600 games that could have been larger were instead 1K or 4K. This has created, in Atari 2600 homebrewing, two opposing inclinations: to try to recreate restrictions faced by the original Atari devs by making the best possible games that are 1K to 4K in total size, or to try to shatter the artificial ceiling Atari created in the 1980s by making games startlingly larger and more complex than anything released back then. The latter trend sees devs using (e.g.) nonstandard bankswitching methods that actually make their games—at least for now—unreadable even with the emulator-driven Atari 2600+.
For this reason, Atari 2600 homebrew fans often note that you can tell pretty quickly whether a given homebrew is trying to push the capabilities of the system or, rather, replicate the sort of coding and gaming experience devs and gamers (respectively) had over forty years ago. And then, of course, there’s a third category—reflected in its own ranking section, below—that sees Atari 2600 homebrewers trying to update 1K or 4K games from the 1970s or 1980s to make them titles that push the console’s limits; this category is called “enhancements” in the report below.
{Note: We might also add a fourth category, which is homebrewers who are most intent on coverting arcade games to home consoles for the first time. It is amazing how many great arcade games were never brought to the Atari 2600, and therefore how many great gaming experiences are just waiting to be brought into the now-sprawling Atari 2600 console library.}
You can better understand, now, why Atari 2600 homebrewing is so legally fraught. If Atari willingly chose to make many of its games 1K or 4K over forty years ago, its new iteration may still see itself as having a vested interest in preventing its console’s fans from making those games better. If it failed to convert certain arcade games it could and should have converted to its console, it may think it needs to stop 21st century homebrewers from doing so if it sees conducting such conversions itself as a way of staying relevant now that the 2600 (or “VCS”) has been re-released. In other words, Atari SA might still decide that it wants to capture those licenses and produce those conversions on its own even if such projects are still years away. It even might have a vested interest in not supporting or celebrating 16K, 32K, or 64K homebrews that put its originals to shame. As noted above, it’s simply unmistakably true that better Atari 2600 games have been released in this century as compared to the last one, and while that’s amazing for gamers and for art critics like this author, we can readily understand why Atari SA might feel conflicted about it even if it’s committed (and it appears to be) to not repeating the mistakes of Atari Inc.
Sidebar: The Homebrew Boom
Homebrews generally arise just a few years after a console is officially off the market, and that’s what happened with the NES and Atari 2600. The Atari 2600 homebrew scene arose in the mid- to late 1990s and took off in the late 2000s, while the NES homebrew scene arose in the late 2000s and took off in the mid- to late 2010s. But oddly, both these scenes—one centering on a console that was more or less culturally irrelevant by the late 1980s, and the other that was overshadowed by its Nintendo-made successors (as well as the upstart PlayStation) by the late 1990s—really saw their renaissance in the latter half of the last decade, with the NES scene achieving full bloom in the 2010s only about 36 months after the Atari 2600 homebrewing scene did.
To be sure, there were amazing homebrews created for the Atari 2600 pre-2016. But to go back and look at AtariAge conversations about the best homebrews from the first half of the 2010s is to be astonished at how many gamers felt at the time that the Atari 2600 homebrews out there were (a) somewhat few in number, and (b) primarily ports, conversions, demakes, or remakes—even clones—rather than original games. Retro reviewed one such thread from mid-2014, entitled “The 10 Best Homebrews to Date”, and saw instantly that the most love by far was for conversions, demakes, ports, and remakes like Strat-O-Gems, Halo 2600, Seawolf, Go Fish!, Boulder Dash, Juno First, Thrust, Princess Rescue, Chetiry, Lady Bug, Medieval Mayhem, and Space Rocks; while there’s scattered appreciation for originals like Gunfight and Fall Down, these latter two are games that—while excellent—featured simple gameplay and game design and only distantly reflect the original Atari 2600 releases that we are now seeing in the 2020s.
Stay Frosty coming along in 2007 does now seem, in retrospect, like the start of a new era in the post-1996 Atari 2600 homebrew scene. Indeed, it really does appear that homebrew scenes can be permanently inflected by certain releases—and Stay Frosty surely was one of those for the Atari 2600 homebrew scene. The game wasn’t just an original but instantly felt like a “new classic”, with a game design so innovative and intuitive yet simple it made the title an instant hit.
In the years that followed, more and more of the most-respected games released in the Atari 2600 homebrew scene were originals—a trend that culminated, if not for this reason, with AtariAge deciding to exclude most conversions, demakes, ports, and remakes from its online store post-acquisition. The immediate effect of this was that many such games because hard-to-find and enormously expensive on the secondary market, but an unexpected knock-on effect appears to be a renewed interest in the Atari 2600 homebrew scene by those who love original homebrews. To be clear, it’s not that there’s any less love now for conversions, demakes, ports, and remakes than there has been in the past, merely that there seems to be a new influx of interest in Atari 2600 homebrewing from those whose focus is more on what old hardware can be made to do than on appreciating or updating games the hardware has long supported.
Tellingly, we see a similar trend in NES homebrewing. The earliest homebrewer stars were devs with an obvious appreciation for the Atari 2600 and other consoles of that era. They made NES ports of Frogger, Scramble, E.T., and other second-gen classics while also bringing to the NES for the first time by-then decades-old Sokoban and Sudoku games. In the first half of the 2010s, if you’d asked many NES homebrew fans which NES homebrews they most appreciated, their lists would have been chock full of illegal Atari 2600 ports.
But then came Battle Kid.
While Battle Kid may have resembled certain games from the Mega Man series, it was unmistakably an original, and offered a level of difficulty that made it—much like the subsequent, and equally difficult, Slow Mole—a magnet for speedrunners on Twitch.
What followed was a renaissance NES homebrewing is still in, with NES ports almost unheard of amongst new releases and an expectation of originality in game design and gameplay that exists in roughly one-to-one ratio with what one imagines was on order behind the scenes in the professional NES game-development community in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Sure, we still find amazing homages to past games—think Super Sunny World for Super Mario Bros. series, or From Below and Tetris—but these are now the exception rather than the rule.
And the same is true in the Atari 2600 homebrew community, where, as you will note below, many of the the most-beloved and highest-ranked titles are originals with no obvious precursor or precedent in the 2600’s first lifespan. These are games that feel very much of this time and space rather than any other. In this regard, NES and Atari 2600 homebrewing exhibit a kinship that belies their different evolutionary timelines; while one may have manifested well before the latter, it seems that in this moment of universal nostalgia, it is both homebrew scenes that are enjoying a heyday.
How to Play Atari 2600 Homebrews in 2024
Unlike NES homebrew ROMs, Atari 2600 homebrew ROMs are often free or request an optional donation with download. However, carts and CIB (“complete-in-box”) games, the latter of which include all three of a cart and a box and a manual, still will cost you around $45 to $60 (or $25 to $35 for cart-only). For those playing ROMs, I recommend using—for Android phones—2600.emu for non-MAME games and MAMEdroid for MAME games. The former is $2.99 and the latter is free. Generally speaking, there’s even less commerce involved in Atari 2600 home-brewing than there is in NES home-brewing (though I suppose in the latter case it’s increasingly become a viable business scheme for certain developers and publishers), which means that even if you’re looking for harder-to-find Atari 2600 homebrews, you’re more likely to pay $100 to $300 rather than, as is the case with NES homebrews, $500 to $1,000.
Now, in saying that I like to play video games on my phone I know I am a real outlier.
Most folks who regularly play Atari 2600 games not only use heavily modded consoles or third-party products that let you play with a Sega Genesis controller rather than the Atari joystick—which candidly no one liked; I even preferred the now-infamous Intellivision controller—but also are likely to want to play on either original hardware (either modded or the 2600+) or use an emulator like RetroN 77 that lets them play on a laptop or a contemporary television. Why do I like playing on my phone, instead? I don’t know. I guess I have a somewhat nice phone, I enjoy playing “handheld” style, and I need portability for all my gaming device(s) given my schedule and lifestyle. I mention all this just to say that if you’re just now getting into Atari 2600 gaming, you have probably heard a lot of the reviewers on YouTube talking about using Stella, an excellent VCS emulator, or employing a Harmony cart, or else playing 2600 games on an original Atari 7800 console. These are all fine options, and as long as you are not pirating games—a practice Retro explicitly detests, decries, and denounces—you’ll be fine.
Of course, one could easily take the question atop this subsection as asking something else altogether: not what hardware to play on, but literally how to play these games. As noted above, it’s important to go into playing most Atari 2600 games understanding that at the time such games were at their peak in popularity the focus was on high scores. But even if you reject that now somewhat outdated worldview, there’s a way of playing Atari 2600 games that’s very much consistent with how people play games today, especially gamers who stream their play sessions live on Twitch: speedrunning.
Both the NES and the Atari 2600 are really great for speed-running—seeking not the highest possible score, but the fastest possible completion time of each level and the game as a whole—because they are (especially the Atari 2600) arcade-forward consoles with simple enough game dynamics that a gamer can become so expert in every jump and other maneuver in the title that, with just a few weeks or months of practice, they can be quite nearly the most adept player of that particular game. This is especially true of homebrews, which in most cases have no established world records for level or game completion yet. Just as many young people are finding that they don’t have the time to spend 200 hours on a AAA game for the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5, they are discovering, too, the joys of playing short games as quickly as possible. Indeed, one explanation for the recent trend toward young gamers appreciating games whose release dates they weren’t alive for is that gaming culture is in a way returning to what it was more than forty years ago. We must remember that the “first version of Twitch” was kids watching other kids play arcade games live in the late 1970s and 1980s—and that the earliest bouts of “achievement envy” among gamers came over high scores on Atari 2600 games, not speedrunning videos on YouTube. It’s not too much to say that how one plays the homebrews ranked below could be just as key to your enjoyment of them as what the games themselves feature with respect to game design and gameplay.